Light and Liberty: Thomas Jefferson and the Power of Knowledge

The Jefferson Gospel: A Religious Education of Peace, Reason, and Morality

The Je√erson Gospel A Religious Education of Peace, Reason, and Morality cameron addis Most of Jefferson’s contemporaries agreed in principle with his core belief about education, that it should reinforce democracy by teaching citizens and leaders about the world and their rights and responsibilities . But his notion that public education should emphasize scientific rather than scriptural revelation was more controversial. While the First Amendment succeeded generally in providing Americans with a pluralistic and relatively tolerant religious landscape, they have argued ever since over prayer, Bible instruction, and evolution vs. creationism in public schools. Je√erson boasted near the end of his second presidential term that Americans had ‘‘solved, by fair experiment, the great and interesting question whether freedom of religion is compatible with order in government and obedience to the laws.’’ But in education these issues remained unresolved except insofar as there was a near consensus in Je√erson’s time that theologians should run even public schools. Je√erson countered that trend in Virginia, where his proscience agenda and religious heterodoxy clashed with the Protestant majority . Over the course of his half-century campaign to institute schools, he developed a curriculum that turned conventional wisdom on its head, instilling ethics based on Enlightenment universalism rather than orthodox Christianity. Confronted with the inescapability of promoting some religious stance (either explicitly or indirectly by omission), Je√erson endorsed a visionary faith at the University of Virginia based on general principles of The Je√erson Gospel 97 ‘‘peace, reason and morality,’’ fending o√ criticism while reconciling his separationist principles with a thriving but relatively open religious culture. Je√erson began studying law at the College of William and Mary in 1762, near the beginning of the revolt against Britain. The conflict between the colonies and mother country immersed the precocious teenager in serious matters of politics, philosophy, and religion. The Anglicans who ran the school, despite their a≈liation with the established Church of England, held liberal latitudinarian religious beliefs—broad by orthodox Christian standards—and Je√erson’s teachers discouraged strict Calvinism and evangelical emotion. They assigned writers who described the Christian tradition as antithetical to peace, accentuating such lowlights of fanaticism and bigotry as the Crusades, Catholic Inquisition, Thirty Years’ War, and French wars of religion. Their work gave Je√erson no appreciation of how faith bolstered the spirituality and sanity of everyday believers; nor did it suggest that religions might defuse, rather than always promote, violence. He consequently developed a fairly harsh and one-sided view of organized faiths that lacked appreciation for the cohesive function of churches in society. Je√erson never argued that organized religions should not exist, however—only that society should repulse their influence or domination over the public realm. Most of the writers he read at William and Mary did not repudiate religion generally so much as they endorsed a more universal approach. Science provided a truer path to spiritual enlightenment than religion’s violent past. Je√erson’s Literary Commonplace Book prominently mentions John (Viscount) Bolingbroke (1678–1751), who argued that Christianity rested on miracles and superstition , not reason or experience. While his contemporaries studied at colleges that grew out of denominational seminaries, Je√erson read writers who saw nature as the genuine path to scientific and religious enlightenment. Given Je√erson’s unwavering commitment to scientific theory, he no doubt would have come to embrace evolution more fully had he lived another half century (he conceded toward the end of his life that species such as the mastodon were mutable), but his religious views were similar to his contemporary William Paley’s Natural Religion, or Intelligent Design in our own time.∞ Je√erson was a deist or, more particularly, a pantheist, since he saw nature as animated with, rather than just created by, divinity.≤ It followed that his take on the American Revolution’s cosmic implications strayed from the usual God and country religious nationalism one might expect from a budding 98 Cameron Addis statesman. In the Declaration of Independence Je√erson kept things universal , predicating the break with Britain on ‘‘the God of Nature’’ rather than the Lord or God almighty. Je√erson had both religious and political faith. His interpretation of the Revolution was rooted in the Jewish and Puritan traditions of a chosen people acting on behalf of a progressive and benevolent deity; the chosen people of the Declaration were...